Tonight I though I spread the wealth a bit and move a shoehorn with FC card to another Octane, leaving the donor with a dual FC in it's PCi cage.

To start with I fitted it to slot C so as to not raise the fans too high.That didn't work very well, FC switch said the port in use was Port_Flt I presume meaning Port Fault which I googled and that what it is.I tested some cables, same things, checked hinv, not found.autoconfig -vf, still not found.

So I removed it and fitted it to slot D..Same scenario.

So I took another Octanes (not the first)'s cage out containing 3 port FC (1x2 Port + 1 x 1 Port)Same procedure, and that worked after autoconfig, but only with the cards inside the Cage.

The Donor Octane that originally had the shoehorn worked fine, and I have been extremely careful.

The Octane in question is running 6.5.30m whereas all the rest are 6.5.30f, which shouldn't matter?

So, questions then are, Do I need a driver for the PCi card or rather shoehorn and can I put it back in slot C ?

My next step will be to put the card either back in the originally Octane or in a third Octane, but I'd rather someone say, 'yeah they are on overlay xyz' as long as it was the darn truth!!

The goal of this of course is to get the FC switch sharing a lot of disk space for discreet stuff and normal stuff.

Well, this was a strange issue, well, still is really.After fitting the shoehorn + FC card into two Octanes and neither picking it up even at the prom level, I fitted it back to the original, where it works fine.. unexplainable!

I'm not worrying anyway, I have managed to get all three octanes working FC and have even ordered some nice new cable.

Next thing, setting up this darn silkworm, another thread I think though.

Not related to the above, but I have been struggling to get a brocade silkworm switch to share a SUN T3 to the Octanes (one would have been a start), and the simplicity of zoning etc and port management from the silkworm interface all seemed very comprehensive and it should have just worked.

Anyhoo, to cut a long story short, it's always the silly little things that get you like the VOLUME on the T3 was not mounted!!!

Once mounted, the Octanes can now both see a Fabric disk attached to the relevant interface.

Next job I will try, creating 3 more LUNS (so 4 in total), so each Discreet machine (2 of them) has a FC StoneFS, then an area for a non-discreet Octane and then one for all three to share and lets see how it copes with that.

uunix wrote:Once mounted, the Octanes can now both see a Fabric disk attached to the relevant interface.

Note that if two systems mount the same (dumb disk array) volume at the same time, you'll get corruption! A disk array is not a file server.

uunix wrote:Next job I will try, creating 3 more LUNS (so 4 in total), so each Discreet machine (2 of them) has a FC StoneFS, then an area for a non-discreet Octane and then one for all three to share and lets see how it copes with that.

Each system getting it's own slice of the disk array sounds more like it.

uunix wrote:Think I deserve a pint...

Always

To accentuate the special identity of the IRIS 4D/70, Silicon Graphics' designers selected a new color palette. The machine's coating blends dark grey, raspberry and beige colors into a pleasing harmony. (IRIS 4D/70 Superworkstation Technical Report)

Yeah, the only way around this is to use a clustered FS like CXFS and then standard file shares for moving stock at FC raw speeds both machines can access data in real time with corrupting the FS. Or stick with terrible sharing over Wire

Also remember any shoehorn or cage in a Octane (for Example 2x2Bgit FC) will STILL be stuck at around 205 Mbyte second, not even the theorehas tical throughput of 266 (because of inefficiencies in the XIO-PCI implementation)